, there are lots of questions, one of which includes how police are handling this case. thelma gutierrez joins us live. was this a cult? what's going on here? >> reporter: don, obviously, there's some kind of a disconnect between the stories that the spouses told investigators and what now the women are telling investigators. so, we're not exactly sure exactly how this thing is going to come out, but i can tell you that they belong to a church here in palmdale. these women say that they just broke off from the church. they went off on these little prayer sessions that they would organize on their own. they routinely would come out to the desert and pray overnight and so, something happened, don, that made the husbands go into authorities and say, we're very concerned. authorities look through some of the belongings that these women left behind, cell phones, apparently letters that were interpreted as good-bye notes, and they wanted to know, were these children, eight children and five women, in any kind of danger. so, they said they wanted to err on the side of caution and so, they started this h
